We have been truly privileged to this week to be working with Josh Hite of Arts Umbrella from Granville Island in Vancouver. And fortunate, too, to have the assistance of Franzeska, who is visiting the Valley from Germany. By some lucky fluke, our school was chosen for an outreach opportunity.  Josh and I met ahead of time to do some planning around creative use of some free, open-source software created through the The Glocal Project.

Josh lead us through a process of thinking about image making through a new lens–both literally and figuratively. We talked about abstraction and representation, appropriation and remix, and how to represent an idea through metaphor. Students created images around two themes: electricity and justice. One aspect of the process that was particularly illuminating was providing critiques of images; this extend much of the work we had been doing on how to provide quality feedback.

In the two weeks we created almost 1000 images. Josh printed of many of them and we then collaborated to create (and curate) a gallery of images which we installed at our neighboring high school. Some grade 11 and 12 students took part in providing feedback, again adding to the richness of the experience.

It was a phenomenal learning experience for all of us. The students and I learned a tremendous amount about creativity and design through the process, and most of all we came away feeling fortunate to have met and worked with Josh and Fanzeska.

The images below offer a taste of the eye-catching images we created. Check the student blogs for their reflections.

Break Dance, that is!

We are taking part in a friendly Christmas challenge with Mr. Kirkpatrick in the UK. His students have been playing with Pivot stick figure animation, and so has Huzzah. We used Creative Commons images and music–and a bit of creativity–and voila! Christmas cheer on the dance floor! So this is a friendly exploration of creativity–not a competition like “So You Think You Can Dance”!
Below are two videos, both by Sam. One was posted to YouTube, the other to Vimeo. Can you notice a difference in quality?  Students have started to embed the videos on their blogs. Take a look at Sophie, Nicholas, Blake, Micheal G., Chelsea, Haley, Kris, Daniel C. and Max, who got their videos embedded today. The rest of the class will be loading the rest of the videos onto their blogs over the next few days.

Break Dancing Pivot from Jan Smith on Vimeo.

Many I have a word with you?

There are many clever tools created by designers that use images.  The tool that made our name in pictures is called Spell With Flickr. It was developed by a 28-year-old programmer from Springfield, New Jersey named Erik Kastner. We will link to his site soon. He created a program that chooses letters from a pool (collection) of pictures on Flickr. We will learn more about the site which allows users to load and share pictures. The pictures are published under Creative Commons licenses. This will be important to you when you start using and sharing images.

In the mean time, what do you think of these? Which one do your prefer–and why?

I would have included the exclamation mark, but there wasn’t room on our page